15 PhD Positions Available in Global Land-Use Change and Telecoupling
- Are you interested in land-use change?
- Would you like to be trained in the telecoupling framework and be on the forefront of understanding processes and actors that influence land-use in an interconnected world?
- Would you like to become an expert in trans- and interdisciplinary concepts and methodologies?
- Are you interested in moving between science and practice in order to qualify for a successful career in research, consulting, industry or governance?
- Are you in the first four years of your research career, or will you graduate soon?
If yes, apply now for a PhD position in the research network “COUPLED – Operationalising telecouplings for sustainability challenges related to land use”!
Funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie ITN Programme, the COUPLED network PhD students will be selected for 3-year advanced multidisciplinary research training, starting July 2018 or earlier.
To see the 15 positions and submit your application, please go to http://coupled-itn.eu/recruitment/
On the website you can learn more about our research programme, the supervisors, the participating host organizations, and much more.
Closing Date: November 24, 2017
Sociology Speaker Series
Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel
Clayton Childress, University of Toronto
Monday, October 30
12:30-1:30 PM
Savery Hall, Room 409
Starting in the early 1970s, in sociology and allied disciplines the studies of cultural production and reception began to split apart. Likewise, while applications of field theory to cultural production and reception have generated no shortage insights about the internal orders within fields, for the most part empirical analyses have stopped short at the relationships betweenfields. What are the consequences of both of these of arrangements? Through following a novel in real-time all the way from its authoring, into its publishing and selling, and then to the reading of it in 21 book groups, this talk reveals how decisions are made, inequalities are reproduced, and novels are built to travel in the creation, production, and consumption of culture.
Top journals routinely publish ridiculous, scientifically implausible claims, justified based on “p < 0.05.” And this in turn calls into question all sorts of more plausible, but not necessarily true, claims, that are supported by this same sort of evidence. To put it another way: we can all laugh at studies of ESP, or ovulation and voting, but what about MRI studies of political attitudes, or stereotype threat, or, for that matter, the latest potential cancer cure? If we can’t trust p-values, does experimental science involving human variation just have to start over? And what do we do in fields such as political science and economics, where preregistered replication can be difficult or impossible? Can Bayesian inference supply a solution? Maybe. These are not easy problems, but they’re important problems.
Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science and director of the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University. He has received the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association, the award for best article published in the American Political Science Review, and the Council of Presidents of Statistical Societies Award for outstanding contributions by a person under the age of 40. His books include Bayesian Data Analysis (with John Carlin, Hal Stern, David Dunson, Aki Vehtari, and Don Rubin), Teaching Statistics: A Bag of Tricks (with Deb Nolan), Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models (with Jennifer Hill), Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do (with David Park, Boris Shor, and Jeronimo Cortina), and A Quantitative Tour of the Social Sciences (co-edited with Jeronimo Cortina).
In an article published last week in Population and Development Review, CSDE Training Director Emilio Zagheni and co-authors present Facebook’s advertising platform as a novel strategy for estimating migration data. Facebook provides a free and accessible means for researchers and advertisers alike to find relevant socio-demographic information about users, which they can then sort by geographic location. Considering the dearth of data sources available for assessing progress towards goals such as sustainable development, this approach—which takes advantage of new data sources—is an important development for demographic research. You can read more about their innovative approach below.
In a recent article, CSDE Biodemography Lab Manager Eleanor Brindle and colleagues present a technique to address the issue of limited information on the status micronutrient deficiencies in the populations of low- and middle-income countries. The micronutrients of concern to the authors are vitamin A, iron, and iodine, deficiencies of which are public health concerns in a number of low- and middle-income nations. Lead author Brindle and her co-authors developed a 7-plex immunoassay that enables the concurrent measurement of seven biomarkers used to determine the status of these micronutrients in populations of concern. According to the authors, this technique could provide an affordable means of surveying populations for nutrient deficiencies, as well as for falciparum malarial parasitemia inflammation and infection. The article is a product of work Brindle has been doing with the international nonprofit organization PATH over past few years, and is accessible below.
Janelle S. Taylor, affiliate and Professor in the Department of Anthropology, has received funding from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) for a new study titled “Health Outcomes for Patients with Dementia without Family Caregivers.” This two-year R21 project includes both quantitative and qualitative components, and will be a collaboration between Taylor as PI and colleagues from Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute; the VA Puget Sound Health Care System; UW Medicine, Social Work, Anthropology; and CSDE. Collaborators include Marlaine F. Gray, Eric B. Larson, Paul K. Crane, Elizabeth K. Vig, Stephanie G.B. Wheeler, Ann M. O’Hare, Clara W. Berridge, and Bettina Shell-Duncan, along with CSDE’s Cori Mar. The research will analyze data from the Adult Changes in Thought (ACT) study–an ongoing longitudinal cohort study of incident dementia–in combination with health records data, to document whether older adults with dementia who lack family support suffer worse health outcomes, and/or different patterns of interaction with the health care system, than do those with strong family support.
This is Taylor’s first time submitting an NIH grant as PI, and it was funded on the first submission–a happy outcome for which Taylor gives much credit to the excellent support that she received from CSDE. She relied upon CSDE staff not only to apply for the grant (John Kemner), but also for guidance on NIH policies and procedures (John Kemner, Sara Curran, Bettina Shell-Duncan), comments and feedback on application drafts (Sara Curran), and advice on study design and preliminary assessments of data (for example, when requesting preliminary data and preparing a power analysis; Cori Mar). She hopes that her positive experience and outcome, as a first-time NIH applicant, may offer encouragement to other CSDE affiliates considering embarking upon what can be a rather daunting application process.